This texteo comprises a student video and my short related writing. The text is derived from my 2008 UC Irvine talk about the types of video writing styles (their strengths and limitations) evidenced by my LFYT students who were inventing new forms and finessing old ones to "write" their coursework as YouTube videos mixed with a video by jweitzel for his popularity project for LFYT 2007.

Contextualization

"The Real, (Lacan): The state of nature from which we have been forever severed by our entrance into language. Only as neo-natal children were we close to this state of nature, a state in which there is nothing but need ... As far as humans are concerned, however, 'the real is impossible,' as Lacan was fond of saying. It is impossible insofar as we cannot express it in language because the very entrance into language marks our irrevocable separation from the real."[cit]

According to OnPostmodernism: "Television and movies represent the pinnacle of mass-produced American culture and exhibit many of the Postmodern motifs shared by other art forms" including "pastiche, spectacle, fakery and mystery."[cit] Pastiche and fakery are common forms of self-referentiality, where a piece of art refers to itself—its forms, ideas, histories, production, genre, and theories, i.e. "This Is the Title of This Story, Which Is Also Found Several Times in the Story Itself."[cit]

YouTube's dizzying hall of media mirrors is built from self-reflexive videos that make YouTuhe both their content and their form. The Real dissolves into a parody of its double, a necessary casualty to a more active and endlessly self-referential and self-fulfilling life online.